In present digital signal processing techniques, it is often necessary to perform vector scalar product and multiplication calculations, with one of the vectors being a constant, i.e. having determined dedicated components. It is recalled that for a vector of dimension p with dedicated components {ak}.sub.1.sup.p and for a vector of arbitrary components {xk}.sub.1.sup.p, where the notation {ak}.sub.1.sup.p and {xk}.sub.1.sup.p is short for: ##EQU2## the value of the scalar product expressed in the form of a scalar product value function is written: ##EQU3## When one of the vectors corresponds to a dedicated application, its components {ak} correspond to dedicated components, i.e. to components of constant value in the application under consideration, and a corresponding encoding technique in accordance with the present invention can be implemented for calculating either a scalar product of the two vectors, or else a multiplication of the two vectors, where the operation of multiplying two vectors corresponds to performing a scalar product on two vectors of dimension p=1.
As appears on reading the description below, circuits for implementing the encoding method of the present invention are particularly simplified because of the said encoding technique.